Tower of Babel

"Let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven", say the people of Babel in the Book of Genesis (11.4) - perhaps the earliest statement of the human urge to make buildings which stretch up to the sky. In the story, the building of the Tower of Babel is seen as a challenge by God, who worries that before long humans will be able to do anything they want. He is so alarmed by this prospect that he sabotages the tower's construction, confusing the builders by making them speak different languages.

The Tower of Babel story was probably inspired by ziggurats, temple towers of Mesopotamia (Iraq), built from around 2,200 BC. Each Mesopotamian city was thought to belong to a local god, whose home was the ziggurat. Constructed of sun-dried mud bricks, the only way to make ziggurats both tall and stable was to have a wide square base, like a pyramid, rising in stepped levels. The shape may also have represented a sacred mountain, or a ladder for the god to climb up to heaven at night. Whatever their function, ziggurats were built to impress. In the flat Mesopotamian landscape, they could be seen for miles around, showing the importance of the god and the city.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian, Herodotus, visited Babylon and climbed the ziggurat. He noted that it had eight levels, with a shrine on top in which a bed stood. The Babylonian priests told Herodotus that this was where their god, Bel, slept every night, though Herodotus added, "I do not believe them."

See a picture of a ziggurat here

Wonder of the world

The most famous ancient tower was a lighthouse on the Isle of Pharos off Alexandria in Egypt. It was begun in the 3rd century BC by Pharaoh Ptolemy Soter and completed by his son, Ptolemy Philadelphus. By planning the lighthouse, Ptolemy earned his title 'Soter' (Saviour). It would save the lives of countless seafarers over the next 1,700 years, until it was finally destroyed by earthquakes.

The lighthouse is estimated to have stood 440ft (134m) high. It was topped with a beacon, to light the way for ships at night, and a mirror, reflecting the sun in the daytime. This allowed it to be seen by ships up to 35 miles (50km) away. It was so famous that it came to be seen as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The building was copied by the Romans when they built their own lighthouses (including a well-preserved example in Dover). The Latin word for a lighthouse was "pharos", after the island, giving several modern terms for lighthouses and beacons, including "phare" (French), "faro" (Spanish and Italian) and "farol" (Portuguese). After the Muslims conquered Egypt, in 639-41, they began to build the first minarets, or prayer towers - probably inspired by Ptolemy's lighthouse.

See a painting of the Alexandria lighthouse here

Medieval towers

Tower-building in England really got going with the coming of the Normans, in 1066. To defend themselves from the English, who greatly outnumbered them, the Norman conquerors built the first castles here, with tall central towers called keeps. These were often painted white so that they could be seen from a distance. Like ziggurats, Norman keeps were built to impress the locals and dominate the landscape. The conquered English could never forget that their new rulers were watching them.

The Normans also used the wealth they gained from the conquest to build huge churches. Almost all the Anglo-Saxon cathedrals and larger churches were rebuilt on a much grander scale, often using white stone brought from Caen in Normandy. A Flemish monk called Goscelin, who lived in Canterbury, wrote soon after the conquest, “I hate small buildings; frankly I would not allow buildings to stay standing – even if everyone liked them – unless they were glorious, magnificently big, very tall and spacious and simply beautiful.”

As time went by and building techniques improved, churches grew taller and taller, with towers topped by soaring lead-encased spires. Like the skyscraper builders of 1930s New York, medieval builders competed to break records, with ever-taller towers and spires. They often overreached themselves. The cathedral towers of Ely, Winchester and Carlisle all fell down, because the structures were built on marshy ground, causing them to sink and tilt. The biggest spire of all, completed around 1300, topped the tower of Lincoln Cathedral. At 525ft (160m) high, Lincoln Cathedral was the first building in history to be taller than the 481ft (146m) Great Pyramid of Giza. This remained the world's tallest building until 1549, when the spire blew down in a gale.

Building in iron

From the late 18th century, the Industrial Revolution brought huge improvements in iron manufacture and construction. This allowed Victorian builders to erect vast iron structures, such as bridges and the railway sheds of the great stations. Yet it was usually felt that iron was ugly, and so Victorian stations hid their metal train sheds behind stone station façades imitating medieval cathedrals or classical temples.

The idea that an iron structure could itself be a thing of beauty, and an emblem of modernity, was first shown in the 1850s, with the building of London's Crystal Palace and Les Halles, the central market halls in Paris. Both buildings resembled giant greenhouses, using slender iron struts to support large areas of glass, letting in a maximum amount of light. For the first time in major public buildings, all the metalwork was exposed.

See a drawing of Crystal Palace here

Iron, which is light but very strong, proved to be the ideal material for towers. In 1884-9 it was used by Gustave Eiffel to build a 986ft (300m) high

wrote, "All the cutting force of the wind passes into the interior of the leading edge uprights… Before coming together at the high pinnacle, thetower for the World’s Fair in Paris. Eiffel, an expert bridge builder, designed his tower by calculating the most efficient shape for wind resistance. He uprights appear to burst out of the ground, and in a way to be shaped by the action of the wind."

Like most radically modern buildings, the Eiffel Tower aroused outrage while it was being built. Leading French writers joined together to attack the tower, which they described as “this truly tragic street lamp" (Léon Bloy) and "a half-built factory pipe, a carcass waiting to be fleshed out with freestone or brick, a funnel-shaped grill" (Joris-Karl Huysmans).

Despite such protests, the Eiffel Tower proved to be massively popular, receiving two million visitors during the 1889 World’s Fair. It rapidly became the most instantly recognisable icon of Paris. So it was that, just two years after the Eiffel Tower opened, a smaller copy began to rise in Blackpool.